Paul Fauvet
9 July 2009
opinion
Maputo — For the second week running, Maputo's gutter press, the weekly paper "Zambeze", has devoted a lengthy article to denouncing me.
On the one hand, I am flattered. This is the same paper that has repeatedly libeled such outstanding figures in the Mozambican legal system as Attorney-General Augusto Paulino, lawyer Albano Silva, and Supreme Court judges Luis Mondlane, Joao Carlos Trindade and Norberto Carrilho. So I am in good company.
On the other hand, unwary readers might believe that the words put in my mouth by "Zambeze" bear some relation to reality. So perhaps I had better set the record straight.
Almost everything in the two articles is one lie tumbling after another. At no time does "Zambeze" actually quote from anything I have written. Instead, the articles are mere assertions, most of which can easily be shown as untrue, when confronted with the articles published by AIM.
In the very title, "Zambeze" claims that "Paul Fauvet wants to silence the independent press". The idea is absurd. Even if I wanted to, I have no means of silencing anybody. The anonymous author of these two articles is clearly confusing criticism with censorship.
Criticising nonsense that appears in "Zambeze" or elsewhere in the media is not the same thing as demanding that it be silenced.
But most of the content of the two articles concerns what I allegedly wrote about a series of trials - the 2002-3 trial of the murderers of Mozambique's most prominent investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso; the 2003 trial of the police officers accused of complicity in the escape from the Maputo top security prison of Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the man who led the death squad that murdered Cardoso; the 2004 trial of the men who defrauded the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM) of the equivalent of 14 million dollars; and the 2008 trial of six men accused of the attempt to murder Albano Silva in November 1999.
All the trials are interlinked: the men found guilty of defrauding the BCM, Vicente Ramaya and Momad Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini"), were also, along with Satar's brother, Ayob Abdul Satar, found guilty of ordering the assassination of Cardoso. Silva and Cardoso were thorns in the flesh of Ramaya and the Satars - Silva, as the BCM's lawyer, and Cardoso, in the pages of his daily newsheet "Metical", fought tenaciously to bring the BCM case to trial - a tenacity that cost Cardoso his life, and almost cost Silva his.
Despite the lengthy Cardoso and BCM trials and their outcomes, there is an alternative narrative put forward by the criminals themselves. This narrative claims that, although the money disappeared from the BCM branch run by Ramaya, via accounts opened by members of the Abdul Satar family, the true fraudsters were members of the BCM Board of Directors. As for the Cardoso murder, the alternative story is that this was ordered by Nyimpine Chissano, the oldest son of the then President, Joaquim Chissano.
The habitual lethargy of the Mozambican judicial system meant that the second case file on the Cardoso murder, in which Chissano Junior was named as a suspect, never came to trial. Nyimpine died of a heart attack in November 2007. He was thus never given the opportunity to clear his name, and the Mozambican public never had the chance to know if prosecutors had anything on him other than claims made by Nini Satar.
The version of events given by the criminals has been enthusiastically defended by "Zambeze" - which explains why, almost every week, attacks on Albano Silva appear in the paper. So loyal is the paper to the Abdul Satar family that it has even printed fawning interviews with the undoubted assassin Anibalzinho: he was welcome in the pages of "Zambeze" because, after the death of Nyimpine Chissano, he conveniently changed his story to implicate Nyimpine in the Cardoso murder (something he had been steadfastly denying for the previous three years).
I have probably written more than any other journalist in Mozambique on the BCM and Cardoso murder trials and their sequels. This material can easily be consulted in the AIM daily newscasts, and in the AIM monthly magazine I edit, "Mozambiquefile". Yet in its polemic against me, the anonymous "Zambeze" author does not actually cite any of this voluminous material. Instead, he just makes it up. Thus "Zambeze" claims that I distorted the trial of the murderers of Carlos Cardoso in 2002 by "writing falsely in defence of Nyimpine Chissano, guaranteeing that he responded in a senene and secure manner to the questions asked by judge Augusto Paulino".
I said nothing of the sort, of course. What I actually wrote was "The President's son had every opportunity to clear his name when he was called to give evidence on 5 December. But his performance on the witness stand was mediocre. In particular, he was unable to give a credible account of his dealings with the Satars" (Mozambiquefile, December 2002)
Later in the same article I wrote "Chissano also told the court he had never worked for the privatised Austral Bank. But on 5 August 2002, the weekly paper "Savana" reported that Austral had hired Nyimpine as a consultant on a salary of US$ 3,000 a month as from 1997 This "Savana" story has never been denied".
A few paragraphs later I wrote "Nyimpine's alibi depended on one person - Candida Cossa. But when she took the witness stand, the story she gave of her relations with Expresso Tours (a company owned by Nyimpine) and the Satars was wildly different from that of Nyimpine".
"Zambeze" claims that I "never questioned the three removals (from prison) of Anibalzinho". In fact, after Anibalzinho's first mysterious escape, I wrote an editorial (Mozambiquefile, September 2002), entitled "A national disgrace or a normal occurrence?", in which I called for the resignation of the then Interior Minister Almerino Manhenje. I wrote "His position has become absolutely untenable. In some of the Mozambican press, claims are made that Manhenje himself ordered Anibalzinho's release. As the weeks turn into months, and there is no sign of Anibalzinho's re-arrest, these claims become increasingly credible".
When Anibalzinho made his second escape, in June 2004, I penned a further editorial entitled "An Affront to Justice" (Mozambiquefile, July 2004), in which I wrote "No heads have rolled. No-one in the police force or the Interior Ministry has been sacked, or offered their resignations. The man at the top, Almerino Manhenje (whose response to the first escape was that "prisoners escape from jails all over the world") is still at his desk. Four police officers on duty on the day of the escape have been arrested, but nobody seriously imagines that such a high profile prisoner can escape just because a few low level cops have been bribed. It was certainly not the sentries on duty who smuggled Anibalzinho out of the country, arranged a false passport for him, and provided an air ticket to Canada".
On one point "Zambeze" is correct. I did call judge Carlos Caetano a demagogue after he acquitted all seven policemen charged with collusion in Anibalzinho's first escape. Of course, "Zambeze" does not put the word "demagogue" in context. I criticized Caetano for not calling as witnesses several people whose names were mentioned during the trial - including Nyimpine Chissano, and officers of the Presidential Guard, such as Vascolino Antonio. Nini Satar was allowed to mention these people and claim they were involved. Why did Caetano not follow Paulino's example and put Nyimpine Chissano on the witness stand?
Caetano claimed the seven policemen were "just scapegoats to hide the class of untouchables". I commented that this was "a hypocritical remark given that the judge made no attempt to call Nyimpine Chissano or Vascolino Antonio to testify".
In the Mozambiquefile editorial of September 2003, I wrote that releasing all the suspects "and making bombastic noises about 'untouchables' was the easy way out. But if Caetano had really wanted to do something about the 'untouchables' he could have named them and demanded that they appear as witnesses. Failure to do so suggests that his remarks were mere demagogy".
"Zambeze" claimed that I radically changed my position towards the former head of the Maputo Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), Antonio Frangoulis. Initially, I was supposedly so enthusiastic towards Frangoulis that I called for his appointment as national director of PIC. Then I turned against him and called him "corrupt and dishonest". Neither claim is true. I have never held the strange belief that journalists should intervene in the promotion of police officers. Nor do I have any evidence of corruption on the part of Frangoulis.
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